ICEYE's overall mission is to enable better decision making for everyone by providing timely and reliable Earth observation data. To achieve that goal, the company is developing its own synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) sensor technologies suitable for satellites under 100kg in weight. ICEYE is building a constellation of 18 SAR satellite by end of 2020 and that will enable a 3 hour on average revisit rate around the globe.

ICEYE-X1 is ICEYE's first proof-of-concept microsatellite mission with a SAR sensor as its payload. It was launched on 12 January 2018, on ISRO's PSLV-C40 rocket from Satish Dhawan Space Center in India. ICEYE-X1 is also the world's first SAR satellite in this size (under 100kg), enabling radar imaging of the Earth through clouds and even in total darkness. The satellite is also the very first Finnish commercial satellite. The ICEYE-X1 demonstration mission was ended in 2018 with very successful results in demonstrating the capabilities of the novel SAR sensor and captured more than 600 unique acquisitions from a variety of test sites.

The ICEYE-X2 satellite was delivered into orbit via Spaceflight's SSO-A: SmallSat Express mission aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on 3 December 2018, from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, and it is in active use and performing very well. ICEYE-X2 features a range of technology improvements to increase the versatility and quality of the imaging data compared to ICEYE-X1. Improvements relate to items such as component choices, subsystem interfaces, software code, operations procedures, communication links, and optimization of power management. ICEYE-X2 possesses various imaging modes to provide imagery at high resolution and alternatively with a very wide swath to support different types of use cases. Representative use-cases for the data are for instance monitoring sea ice movements or marine oil spills, and prevention of illegal fishing.

01 March 2019

The ICEYE data familiarization phase freely offers ICEYE imagery over several demonstration sites and is continuing this by presenting to the user community the new ICEYE-X2 products in place of older ICEYE-X1 data: this data is more representative of higher quality achieved by the new ICEYE microsatellite.

04 October 2018

ESA and ICEYE are pleased to announce the opportunity to freely access, up to the end of the year, ICEYE imagery over several demonstration sites, to assess image quality and suitability for several applications: monitoring urban, agricultural and forest environments, and vessel tracking (ship detection).

ICEYE imagery products are primarily available as Level-1 SLC and GRD products, along with Level-2 products produced from them.

Name

Description

Product Level

SM RAW

RAW products consist of compressed and unfocused SAR raw data. They form the basis for producing all other, higher level SAR products.

Level 0

SM SLC

Single Look Complex (SLC) products consist of focused SAR data geo-referenced using orbit and attitude data from the satellite and provided in zero-Doppler slant-range geometry. The products include a single look in each dimension using the full transmit signal bandwidth and consist of complex samples preserving the phase information and represent the basis for further processing.

Geometrically corrected (orthorectified) terrain corrected data using typically the best available digital elevation model and a basic set of GCPs for refining original georeferencing information

Level 2a

SM PRES

Geometrically and radiometrically corrected (orthorectified) terrain flattened data using typically the best available digital elevation model and an extended set of GCPs for refining original georeferencing information